The Hunger Angel Part 5

Toward morning it turned cool, a milk-gla.s.s sky. Your feet felt lighter, at least in your head, because the s.h.i.+ft was near its end and you wanted to forget how tired you were. The floodlight was tired, too, overcast and pale. The blue air settled evenly on each row and every block of our surreal military cemetery. A quiet justice unfolded, the only one that existed here.

The cinder blocks had it good, our dead had neither rows nor stones. But you couldn't think about that, otherwise you wouldn't be able to balance your load for several days or nights. If you thought about that even a little there would be a lot of waste, and a lot of beating.

The gullible bottle and the skeptical one.

It was the skinandbones time, the eternity of cabbage soup. Kapusta when you get up in the morning, kapusta after roll call in the evening. KAPUSTA means cabbage in Russian, and cabbage soup in Russian means soup that often has no cabbage at all. If you take away the Russian and the soup, kapusta is just a word made of two things that have nothing in common-except this word. CAP is Romanian for head, and PUSTA is the Great Hungarian Plain. The camp is as Russian as the cabbage soup, but we think these things up in German. Nonsense like that is supposed to show we're still clever. But no matter what you do with it, KAPUSTA doesn't work as a hunger word. Hunger words make up a map, but instead of reciting countries in your head you list names of food. Wedding soup, mincemeat, spare ribs, pig's knuckles, roast hare, liver dumplings, haunch of venison, hasenpfeffer, and so on.

All hunger words are also eating words, you picture the food in front of your eyes and feel the taste in your mouth. Hunger words, or eating words, feed your imagination. They eat themselves, and they like what they eat. You never get full, but at least you're there for the meal. Every person with chronic hunger has his preferred eating words, some rare, some common, and some in constant use. Each person thinks a different word tastes best. Orach didn't work as an eating word any more than kapusta, because we actually ate it. Had to eat it.

I believe that in hunger there is no difference between blindness and sight, blind hunger sees food best. There are silent hunger words and loud ones, just as hunger has its secret side and its public side. Hunger words, or eating words, dominate every conversation, but even so, you're still alone. Everyone eats his words by himself although we're all eating together. There's no thought for the hunger of others, you can't hunger together. Cabbage soup was our main food, but it mainly took the meat from our bones and the sanity from our minds. The hunger angel ran around in hysterics. He lost all proportion, growing more in a single day than gra.s.s in an entire summer or snow in an entire winter. Perhaps as much as a tall, pointed tree grows in its entire life. It seems to me the hunger angel didn't just grow in size but also in number. He provided each of us with our own individual agony, and yet we were all alike. Because in the trinity of skin, bones, and brown water, men and women lose all difference, and lose all s.e.xual drive. Of course you go on saying HE or SHE but that's merely a grammatical holdover. Half-starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects.

No matter where I was, in my bunk or between the barracks, at the yama on a s.h.i.+ft or with Kobelian on the steppe, near the cooling tower, or was.h.i.+ng up in the banya, or going door-to-door-everything I did was hungry. Everything matched the magnitude of my hunger in length, width, height, and color. Between the sky overhead and the dust of the earth, every place smelled of a different food. The main street of the camp smelled like caramel, the entrance to the camp like freshly baked bread, crossing the street to the factory smelled like warm apricots, the wooden fence of the factory like candied nuts, the factory gate like scrambled eggs, the yama like stewed peppers, the slag heaps like tomato soup, the cooling tower like roasted eggplant, the labyrinth of steaming pipes like strudel with vanilla sauce. The lumps of tar in the weeds smelled like quince compote and the c.o.ke ovens like cantaloupe. It was magic and it was agony. Even the wind fed the hunger, spinning food we could literally see.

Because the skinandbones people were s.e.xless to each other, the hunger angel coupled with everyone. He also betrayed the flesh he had just stolen from us, dragging more and more lice and bedbugs into our beds. The skinandbones time meant the weekly delousing parade in the yard after work. Every person and every thing had to be taken outside to be deloused-suitcases, clothes, bunks, and ourselves.

It was the third summer, the acacias were blooming, the evening breeze smelled like warm cafe au lait. I had taken everything outside. Then Tur Prikulitsch came over with the green-toothed Tovarishch s.h.i.+shtvanyonov, who was carrying a freshly peeled willow cane, twice as long as a flute, flexible enough for beating, with a sharpened tip for rummaging around. Disgusted by our misery, he would skewer things in our suitcases and fling them out onto the ground.

I had positioned myself as close as possible to the middle of the delousing parade, because the searches at the front and near the end were merciless. But this time s.h.i.+shtvanyonov decided he wanted to bring some rigor to the middle. His cane drilled through the clothes in my gramophone box and hit my toilet kit. He put down the cane, opened my toilet kit, and discovered my secret cabbage soup. For three weeks I'd been storing cabbage soup in the two beautiful bottles I couldn't throw away just because they were empty. And so, because they were empty I filled them with cabbage soup. One was a round-bellied bottle of rippled gla.s.s, with a screw top, the other had a flat belly and a wider neck, for which I'd even whittled a decent wooden stopper. To keep the cabbage soup from spoiling, I sealed it airtight the way we sealed stewed fruit at home. Trudi Pelikan lent me a candle from the sick barrack, and I dripped some stearine around the stopper.

Shto eto, asked s.h.i.+shtvanyonov.

Cabbage soup.

What for.

He shook the little bottle so that the soup foamed up.

Na pamyat', I said.

Kobelian had taught me that Russians considered memento a good word, that's why I said it. But s.h.i.+shtvanyonov was probably wondering what I needed this memento for. Who could be dumb enough to need little bottles of cabbage soup to remind him of cabbage soup when cabbage soup is served here twice a day.

For home, he asked.

I nodded. That was the worst thing possible, that I intended to take cabbage soup home in little bottles. He would have beaten me on the spot, and I could have put up with it, but he was only halfway through his parade and didn't want to fall behind. He confiscated my bottles and ordered me to report to him.

The next morning Tur Prikulitsch escorted me out of the mess hall to the officers' room. He marched down the camp street like a driven man, and I followed like a condemned man. I asked him what I should say. Without turning around he waved his hand dismissively as if to say, I'm not getting involved. s.h.i.+shtvanyonov roared at me. Tur could have saved himself the trouble of translating, by now I knew it all by heart. I was a Fascist, a spy, a saboteur, and a pest, I had no culture, and by stealing cabbage soup I was committing treason against the camp, against Soviet authority, and against the Soviet people.

The cabbage soup was thin enough in the camp, but in these bottles with their narrow necks, it was almost completely clear. And as far as s.h.i.+shtvanyonov was concerned, the few strands of cabbage floating in the bottles were a clear denunciation. My situation was precarious. Then Tur held up his finger, he had an idea: medicine. For the Russians, though, medicine was only a half-good word. Tur realized that just in time, so he twirled his index finger against his forehead as if he were drilling a hole and said, with a hint of meanness in his voice: Obscurantism.

That made sense. Tur explained that I'd only been in the camp for three years, that I wasn't yet reeducated, that I still believed in magic potions against disease, and so I kept the bottle with the screw top against diarrhea, and the one with the stopper against constipation. s.h.i.+shtvanyonov pondered what Tur was saying, and not only believed him but even went so far as to note that while obscurantism was admittedly not good in the camp, it wasn't such a bad thing in life. He examined both bottles one more time, shook them until the foam rose in their necks, then moved the one with the screw top a little to the right and the one with the wooden stopper exactly the same distance to the left so that the two bottles were touching each other. By then s.h.i.+shtvanyonov's mouth had softened and his gaze had mellowed, thanks to the bottles. Tur had another good idea and said: Get lost. Now.

I suspect that s.h.i.+shtvanyonov didn't simply throw the bottles away, for some inexplicable-or even explicable-reason.

But what are reasons, really. To this day I don't know why I filled the bottles with cabbage soup. Did it have something to do with my grandmother's sentence: I know you'll come back. Was I really so naive as to think I'd come home and present the cabbage soup to my family as though I were bringing them two bottles of life in the camp. Or was I still clinging to the notion, despite the hunger angel, that whenever you go on a trip you bring back a souvenir. From her one and only voyage on a s.h.i.+p my grandmother had brought me a sky-blue, thumb-sized Turkish slipper from Constantinople. But that was my other grandmother, who hadn't said anything about coming back, who lived in a different house and hadn't even been at ours to say good-bye. Did I think the bottles would be some kind of witness for me at home. Or was one bottle gullible and the other skeptical. Was the screw-top bottle filled with my trip home and the stoppered bottle filled with my staying here forever. Could it be that they were opposites, just like diarrhea and constipation. Did Tur Prikulitsch know more about me than he should. Was talking to Bea Zakel doing me any good.

Was going home even the opposite of staying here. I probably wanted to be up to both possibilities, if it came to that. I probably wanted to make sure that my life here, my life in general, wouldn't stay trapped in yearning to go home every day and never being able to. The more I wanted to go home, the more I tried not to want it so much that I'd be destroyed if they never let me. I never lost my yearning to go home, but in order to have something besides that, I told myself that even if they kept us here forever, this would still be my life. After all, the Russians have their lives. I don't want to struggle so hard against settling here. All I have to do is stay the way the stoppered half of me already is. I can reeducate myself, I don't yet know how, but the steppe will see to it. The hunger angel had taken possession of me, my scalp was fluttering. My hair had just been clipped on account of lice.

Once during the previous summer, Kobelian had unb.u.t.toned his s.h.i.+rt in the open air, and as it fluttered, he'd said something about the gra.s.sy soul of the steppe and his Ural heart. That could beat in my breast as well, I thought.

On daylight poisoning.

That morning the sun rose very early like a red balloon, so big and round that it made the sky over the c.o.ke plant look flat.

Our s.h.i.+ft had begun during the night. We were standing under the floodlight inside the pek basin, a settling tank two meters deep and two barracks long and wide. The basin was coated with an ancient, vitrified layer of pitch one meter thick. Our job was to clean out the basin with crowbars and pickaxes, chip away the pitch, and load it into wheelbarrows. Then push the wheelbarrows up a rickety plank that led out of the basin to the tracks, and up another plank to dump the pieces in the freight car.

We chipped away at the black gla.s.s: fluted, curved, and jagged shards whizzed by our heads. There was no sign of dust. But then, when I came back down the rickety plank, pus.h.i.+ng my empty wheelbarrow out of the black night and into the white funnel of light, the air s.h.i.+mmered like an organza cape made of gla.s.s dust. As soon as the wind shook the floodlamp, the cape turned into a s.h.i.+ny chrome birdcage that hovered in the exact same spot.

At six a.m. the s.h.i.+ft was over, it had been light outside for an hour. The sun was now shriveled but angry, its globe tight like a pumpkin. My eyes were on fire, every suture in my skull was throbbing. On the way home to the camp everything was glaring. The veins in my neck were ticking away, about to explode, my eyeb.a.l.l.s were boiling inside my head, my heart was drumming in my chest, my ears were crackling. My neck swelled like hot dough and stiffened. Head and neck became one. The swelling spread to my shoulders, neck and upper body became one. The light drilled through me, I had to hurry into the darkness of the barrack. But it wasn't dark enough, even the light from the window was deadly. I covered my head with my pillow. Relief came toward evening, but so did the night s.h.i.+ft, and I had to go back to the floodlight at the pitch basin. On the second night, the nachal'nik came by with a bucket of lumpy, gray-pink paste that we smeared on our faces and necks before entering the site. The paste dried right away and then flaked off.

When the sun rose the next morning, the tar was raging inside my head even worse than before. I lurched into camp like a cat on its last legs and went directly to the sick barrack. Trudi Pelikan stroked my forehead. The medic drew a head in the air that was even more swollen than mine and said SOLNTSYE and SVYET and BOLIT. And Trudi Pelikan cried and explained something about photochemical mucosal reactions.

What's that.

Daylight poisoning, she said.

She handed me a horseradish leaf with a dollop of salve they'd concocted out of marigolds and lard, for rubbing into the raw skin so it wouldn't crack. The medic told me I was too sensitive to work at the pitch basin, she said she might talk to Tur Prikulitsch and that in the meantime she'd write a note saying I needed three days to recover.

I spent three days in bed. Half asleep, half awake, I floated back home on waves of fever, to summer mornings in the Wench. The sun rises very early behind the fir trees, like a red balloon. I peek through the crack of the door, my parents are still asleep. I go into the kitchen, on the kitchen table there's a shaving mirror propped against the milk can. My Aunt Fini, who's as thin as a nutcracker, is wearing a white organza dress. She's running with a curling iron back and forth between the gas stove and the mirror, putting a wave in her hair. Then she combs my hair with her fingers and uses her spit to slick down my cowlick. She takes me by the hand, we go outside to pick daisies for the breakfast table.

The dewy gra.s.s comes up to my shoulders, the meadow rustles and buzzes, it's full of white-fringed daisies and bluebells. The only thing I pick is ribwort, we call it shoot-weed, because you can use the stem as a sling and shoot the seed spike pretty far. I shoot at the glaring white organza dress. All of a sudden a living chain of locusts appears between the organza and Aunt Fini's equally white slip, hooked claw to claw and wrapped around her lower body. She drops her daisies, holds out her arms, and freezes in place. And I slip under her dress and shovel away the locusts with my hands, faster and faster. They're cold and heavy like wet screws. They pinch, I feel afraid. I look up and, instead of Aunt Fini with her freshly waved hair, I see a locust colossus on two skinny legs.

Under the organza dress was the first time I ever had to shovel in desperation. Now I was lying in a barrack for three days, rubbing myself with marigold salve, while everyone else went on working at the pitch basin site. But because I was too sensitive, Tur Prikulitsch rea.s.signed me to the slag cellar.

Which is where I stayed.

Every s.h.i.+ft is a work of art.

There are two of us, Albert Gion and myself, two cellar-people working below the boilers of the factory. In the barrack Albert Gion is quick-tempered. In the dark cellar he is deliberate but decisive, the way melancholy people are. Maybe he wasn't always like that, maybe he became like that in the cellar, the way cellars are. He's been working here a long time. We don't say much, only what's necessary.

Albert Gion says: I'll flip three carts, then you flip three.

I say: After that I'll straighten the mountain-as we called the pile of slag.

He says: Right, then you go push.

Between flipping and pus.h.i.+ng, the s.h.i.+ft goes back and forth, until we're halfway through, until Albert Gion says: Let's sleep for thirty minutes under the board, below number seven, it's quiet there.

And then we start the second half.

Albert Gion says: I'll flip three carts, then you flip three.

I say: After that I'll straighten the mountain.

He says: Right, then you go push.

I say: I'll push when number nine is full.

He says: No, you flip now, I'll push, the bunker's already full.

At the end of the s.h.i.+ft one of us says: Come on, let's make sure the cellar's nice and clean for the next s.h.i.+ft.

After my first week in the cellar, Tur Prikulitsch was once again standing behind me in the barber's mirror. I was half-shaved, and he raised his oily eyes and spotless fingers and asked: So how are things in the cellar.

Cozy, I said, every s.h.i.+ft is a work of art.

He smiled over the barber's shoulder, but had no idea how true this really was. You could hear the thin hatred in his tone, his nostrils had a pink s.h.i.+ne, his temples were veined with marble.

Your face was pretty filthy yesterday, he said, and your cap was so full of holes its guts were hanging out.

Doesn't matter, I said, the coal dust is finger-thick and furry. But after every s.h.i.+ft the cellar's nice and clean, because every s.h.i.+ft is a work of art.

When a swan sings.

After my first day in the cellar, Trudi said in the mess hall: No more pitch-you're a lucky man. It's nicer below ground, isn't it.

Then she told me that when she was hauling the lime wagon during her first year in camp, she'd often close her eyes and dream. Now she takes naked corpses out of the dying room to the back of the courtyard and lays them on the ground like freshly stripped logs. She said that now, too, when she carries the corpses to the door, she often closes her eyes and has the same dream as when she was harnessed to the lime wagon.

What is it, I asked.

That a rich, handsome, young American-he doesn't really have to be handsome or young, an old canned-pork tyc.o.o.n would do-that a rich American falls in love with me. Actually, he doesn't even have to fall in love, he just has to be rich enough to pay my way out of here and marry me. Now, that would be a stroke of luck, she said. And if on top of that he had a sister for you.

She doesn't really have to be beautiful or young, and she doesn't even have to fall in love, I echoed. At that Trudi Pelikan laughed hysterically. The right corner of her mouth started fluttering and left her face, as though the thread connecting laughter to skin had torn in two.

That's why I kept things short when I told Trudi Pelikan about my recurring dream of riding home on the white pig. Just one sentence, and without the white pig: You know, I said, I often dream that I'm riding home through the sky on a gray dog.

She asked: Is it one of the guard dogs.

No, a village dog, I said.

Trudi said: Why ride, it's faster to fly. I only dream when I'm awake. When I'm taking the corpses out to the courtyard, I wish I could fly away to America, like a swan.

I wondered if she knew about the swan on the oval sign at the Neptune Baths. I didn't ask her, but I did say: You know why a swan sounds hoa.r.s.e when it sings, because its throat is always hungry.

On slag.

In the summer I saw an embankment of white slag in the middle of the steppe and thought about the snowy peaks of the Carpathians. Kobelian said the embankment was originally supposed to become a road. The white slag was baked solid, with a grainy composition, like you find in lime-sinks or sh.e.l.l-sand. Here and there the white was streaked with pink that was often so dark it turned gray at the edge. I don't know why pink aging into gray is so heart-stoppingly beautiful, no longer like a mineral, but weary-sad, like people. Does homesickness have a color.

The other white slag was deposited in a series of man-high heaps beside the yama. That slag wasn't baked solid, the piles were edged with gra.s.s. If it rained hard while we were shoveling coal we took shelter in these heaps. We burrowed into the white slag, and it trickled back on top of us, covering us up. In winter, steam rose off the snow on top of the pile, while we warmed ourselves in our holes and were three times hidden: under the snow blanket, inside the slag, and wrapped in our fufaikas. The steam pa.s.sed through every layer, and there was a cozy, familiar smell of sulfur. We sat buried up to our noses, which stuck out of the ground and broke through the melting layer of snow like bulbs that have sprouted too early. When we crawled out of the slag heaps, our clothes were riddled with holes from the tiny embers, and the padding came spilling out of our jackets.

From all my loading and unloading I was well acquainted with the rust-colored, ground-up slag from the blast furnace. That slag has nothing to do with the white kind, it's composed of reddish-brown dust that ghosts through the air with every swing of the shovel and slowly settles like falling folds of cloth. Because it's as dry as the hot summer and thoroughly aseptic, the blast-furnace slag has no bearing on homesickness.

Then there's the solidly baked greenish-brown slag in the overgrown meadow, in the wasteland behind the factory. Under the weeds it looked like broken lumps of salt lick. That slag and I had nothing to do with each other, it let me pa.s.s without making me think of anything in particular.

But my one-and-only slag, my daily slag, the slag of my day and night s.h.i.+ft was the clinker-slag from the boilers at the coal furnaces, the hot and cold cellar slag. The furnaces stood above us, in the world of the living, five to a row, each several stories tall. They provided heat to the boilers, producing steam for the entire plant and hot and cold slag for us in the cellar. They also provided all our work, the hot phase and the cold phase of every s.h.i.+ft.

Cold slag can only come from hot slag, it's nothing more than the dusty residue left when hot slag cools. Cold slag only has to be emptied once per s.h.i.+ft, but the hot clinker-slag requires constant removal, following the rhythm of the furnaces. It has to be shoveled onto countless little rail-carts, then pushed to the top of the mountain of slag at the end of the tracks and dumped.

The hot slag changes from day to day, depending on the mix of coal, which can be kind or malicious. If it's a good mix, the glowing slabs that drop onto the transfer grate are four to five centimeters thick. Having expended their heat, they are brittle and break into pieces that fall easily through the hatch, like toasted bread. The hunger angel is amazed to see how quickly the little carts get filled even when we're weak from shoveling. But if the mix is bad, then the slag doesn't form clinkers and comes out like sticky, white-hot lava. It doesn't fall through the grate on its own but gets clogged in the furnace hatches. You have to use a poker to tear off clumps that stretch like dough. You can't get the oven empty or the cart full. It's an agonizing, time-consuming job.

If the mix is catastrophic, then the furnace gets a real case of diarrhea. Diarrhea slag doesn't wait for the hatch to open, it spurts out of the half-opened doors like s.h.i.+tted-out corn kernels. This slag is dangerous, it glows red and white and shouldn't be looked at, and it can find its way through every hole in your clothes. The flow can't be stopped, so the cart gets buried underneath. Somehow-the devil only knows how-you have to close the hatch, protect your legs, galoshes, and footwraps from the blazing flood, douse the blaze with the hose, dig out the little cart, push it up the mountain, and clean up after the accident-all at the same time. And if on top of everything else, this happens toward the end of your s.h.i.+ft, then it's an absolute disaster. You lose an endless amount of time, and the other furnaces aren't going to wait for you, they need emptying, too. The rhythm becomes frantic, your eyes are swimming, your hands are flying, your feet are shaking. To this day I hate the diarrhea slag.

But I love the once-per-s.h.i.+ft slag, the cold slag. It treats you decently, patiently, and predictably. Albert Gion and I needed each other only for the hot slag. For the cold slag we each wanted to be by ourselves. The cold slag is tame and trusting, almost in need of affection-a violet sand-dust that you can easily be left alone with. The cold slag comes from the last row of furnaces at the very back of the cellar, it has its own special hatches and its own little tin-bellied cart without bars.

The hunger angel knew how happy I was to be left alone with the cold slag. That it wasn't really cold but lukewarm and smelled a little like lilacs or fuzzy mountain peaches and late-summer apricots. But mostly the cold slag smelled of quitting time, because the s.h.i.+ft would be over in fifteen minutes and the danger of a disaster was past. The cold slag smelled of going home from the cellar, of mess-hall soup, and of rest. It even smelled of civilian life, and that made me c.o.c.ky. I imagined that I wasn't going from the cellar to the barrack in a padded suit, but that I was all decked out in a Borsalino, a camel-hair coat, and a burgundy silk scarf, on my way to a cafe in Bucharest or Vienna where I was about to sit down at a little marble-top table. So easygoing was the cold slag that it helped feed the delusions you needed in order to steal your way back into life. Drunk on poison, you could find true happiness with the cold slag, dead-sure happiness.

Tur Prikulitsch had reason to think I would complain. That's why he asked me every few days at the barber's: Well, how is it down there in the cellar.

How are things going in the cellar.

How's the cellar doing.

Are things all right in the cellar.

Or just: And in the cellar.

And because I wanted to beat him at his own game, I always stuck to the same answer: Every s.h.i.+ft is a work of art.

If he'd had the slightest idea about the mix of hunger and coal gases, he would have asked me where I spent my time in the cellar. And I could have said, with the fly ash, because fly ash is another type of cold slag, it drifts everywhere and coats the entire cellar with fur. You can find true happiness with fly ash, too. It isn't poisonous, and it flutters about, mouse-gray and velvety. The fly ash doesn't smell. It's made up of minuscule pieces, tiny scales, that constantly flit around, attaching themselves to everything, like frost crystals. Every surface gets furred. The fly ash turns the wire mesh around the lightbulb into a circus cage complete with fleas, lice, bedbugs, and termites. Termites have wedding wings, I learned in school, and they live in camps. They have a king, a queen, and soldiers. And the soldiers have big heads. There are jaw soldiers, nozzle soldiers, and gland soldiers. And they're all fed by the workers. And the queen is thirty times bigger than the workers. I imagine that's also the difference between the hunger angel and me. Or Bea Zakel and me. Or Tur Prikulitsch and me.

On contact with water, it's not the water that flows but the fly ash, because it sucks up the water and swells into formations, like in a cave. The formations can look like stacks of dishes or, if they're very big, like cement children eating gray apples. Fly ash mixed with water can work magic.

But without light and water, the fly ash just sits there, dead. On the cellar walls it looks just like real fur, on your padded cap like artificial fur, in your nostrils like rubber plugs. Albert Gion's face is black, in the cellar it disappears, all I see are the whites of his eyes and his teeth swimming through the air. With Albert Gion I never know if he's sad or simply withdrawn. When I ask, he says: I don't give it any thought. We're just two pill bugs underground. Seriously.

After our s.h.i.+ft is over we shower in the banya next to the factory gate. Head, neck, and hands are soaped up three times, but the fly ash stays gray and the cold slag stays violet. The cellar colors have eaten into our skin. That didn't bother me, though, in fact I was even a little proud, after all they were also the colors of my life-giving delusion.

Bea Zakel felt sorry for me, she paused to find a tactful way of putting it, but she knew it wasn't a compliment when she said: You look like you stepped out of a silent movie, like Valentino.

She had just washed her hair, her silk braid was plaited smooth and still damp. Her cheeks were well nourished, they blushed red like strawberries.

One time, when I was a child, I ran rhrough the garden while Mother and Aunt Fini were drinking coffee. I found a thick ripe strawberry-the first I'd ever seen-and called out: Look at this, a frog's on fire and it's glowing.

I brought a little piece of hot glowing slag home from the camp, stuck to my right s.h.i.+n. It cooled off inside me and changed into a piece of cold slag that s.h.i.+mmers through my skin like a tattoo.

The burgundy silk scarf.

Once on our way home from the night s.h.i.+ft, my cellar companion Albert Gion said: Now that the days are getting warmer, even if we don't have any food we can always put our hunger in the sun and warm it up. I didn't have any food so I went into the camp yard to warm up my hunger. The gra.s.s was still brown, battered, and singed by the frost. The March sun had a pale fringe. It drifted across the rippled-water sky above the Russian village. And I drifted over to the garbage behind the mess hall, goaded by the hunger angel. Most of the others were still at work, so if no one else had been there yet, I might just find a few potato peels. But then I saw Fenya by the mess hall talking to Bea Zakel, so I pretended I was out on a walk, since I could no longer rummage through the garbage. Fenya was wearing her purple sweater, and that made me think of my burgundy silk scarf. After the fiasco with the gaiters I didn't want to go back to the market. But surely Bea Zakel could trade my scarf for sugar and salt, anyone who could talk the way she could had to be good at haggling. Fenya headed off to the mess hall and her bread, limping in agony. As soon as I caught up to Bea I asked her: When are you going to the market. She said: Maybe tomorrow.

Bea could leave whenever she wanted to, she could always get a pa.s.s from Tur, if she even needed one. She waited on the bench by the main street while I went to fetch my scarf. It was lying on the bottom of my suitcase next to my white batiste handkerchief. I hadn't touched it for months, it was as soft as skin. I felt a s.h.i.+ver down my spine, I was ashamed in front of the scarf with its flowing squares, because I was so ragged and it was still so soft and alluring, with its matte and s.h.i.+ny checks. It hadn't changed in the camp, the checked pattern had maintained the same quiet order as before. The scarf wasn't really right for me anymore, and I wasn't right for it.

As I handed it to Bea, her gaze again slid furtively off to the side. Her eyes were enigmatic, the only beautiful thing about her. She wrapped the scarf around her neck and couldn't resist crossing her arms and stroking it with both hands. Her shoulders were narrow, her arms thin as sticks. But her hips and backside were impressive, a powerful foundation of hefty bones. With her delicate torso and ma.s.sive lower body, Bea Zakel looked as if she'd been put together out of two different women.

Bea took my burgundy scarf to trade. But the next day Tur Prikulitsch was wearing the scarf around his neck at roll call. And for the entire week that followed. He had transformed my burgundy silk scarf into a roll-call rag. After that, every roll call was a dumb show starring my scarf. And it looked good on him, too. My bones were heavy as lead, I lost my ability to breathe in and out at the same time, to roll my eyes back without lifting my head and find a hook in a corner of cloud. My scarf draped around Tur Prikulitsch's neck wouldn't let me do it.

Pulling myself together, I finally asked Tur Prikulitsch after roll call where the scarf had come from. He said, with no hesitation: From home, I've had it forever.

He didn't mention Bea. Two weeks had pa.s.sed, and Bea hadn't given me so much as a crumb of sugar or salt. Did the two of them, well-foddered as they were, have any idea how deeply they were betraying my hunger. Wasn't it their fault that I'd sunk into such misery that my own scarf didn't suit me anymore. Didn't they realize that it was still my property as long as I hadn't received anything in exchange. A whole month pa.s.sed, the sun lost its paleness. The orach came up again silver-green, the wild dill spread its feathers. On my way back from the cellar I picked greens for my pillowcase. When I bent down everything around me went dark, all I could see was the black sun. I cooked my orach and and it tasted like mud, since I still didn't have any salt. And Tur Prikulitsch was still wearing my scarf, and I was still going to the cellar for the night s.h.i.+ft and afterward pa.s.sing through the empty afternoons to the garbage behind the mess hall, because even that tasted better than mock spinach or orach soup with no salt.

On my way to the garbage I again ran into Bea Zakel, and once more she started talking about the Beskid Mountains that flow into the eastern Carpathians. When she reached the part about leaving her little village of Lugi and arriving in Prague, just as Tur was finally switching from becoming a missionary to business, I interrupted her and asked: Bea, did you give Tur my scarf.